The Fisher Center at Bard Presents the World Premiere of Pam Tanowitz’s Pastoral, a Collaboration with Visual Artist Sarah Crowner and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer Caroline Shaw, June 27–29

Tanowitz’s Fourth SummerScape Commission Is a New Work Honoring and Transforming Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major

The Fisher Center at Bard, one of the country’s leading multidisciplinary producing houses, offering extraordinary support to artists to realize ambitious and visionary projects, presents Pam Tanowitz’s Pastoral (June 27–29), opening SummerScape 2025 (June 27 – August 17). For Pastoral, Tanowitz collaborates with artist Sarah Crowner and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw to create a work that muses on and transforms Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major. Together, the collaborators take the beloved classical work, also called the Pastoral Symphony, as a choreographic and compositional framework, then erase it—creating something new with what remains. 

This is the Fisher Center LAB Choreographer in Residence’s fourth major work commissioned for SummerScape. It follows Four Quartets, her take on T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece of the same name (deemed “the greatest work of dance theater so far this century” by The New York Times); the “thrilling” (The New York Times) outdoor performance I was waiting for the echo of a better day; and Song of Songs, her Biblical poem-inspired collaboration with David Lang (regarded as “a thing of beauty” by The Guardian). Tanowitz’s commissions for Bard SummerScape later reached audiences at New York City Center, the Barbican Centre, CAP UCLA, and BAM. With Pastoral, Tanowitz continues her series of groundbreaking performances that respond to masterworks of the past. Of SummerScape’s dance commissioning program, including Tanowitz's premieres, The New York Times wrote, “This series is building a track record of reliable transcendence.” 

Tanowitz first created a dance to Beethoven, then removed the music, replacing it with a specially commissioned score by long-time collaborator Shaw, which itself responds to and transforms the Beethoven score. The décor for the production is created by Crowner, well-known for her painted and sewn abstract canvases which evoke pastoral landscapes in magnificent jewel colors. The resulting performance is a gorgeous palimpsest of many artistic layers, with Beethoven’s evocation of the natural world as a guiding spirit.

The company includes seven members of Pam Tanowitz Dance—Marc Crousillat, Christine Flores, Lindsey Jones, Maile Okamura, Caitlin Scranton, Stephanie Tersaki, and Anson Zwingelberg, with Taylor LaBruzzo as the understudy. 

The creative team includes Reid Bartelme (costume design), Justin Ellington (sound design), Davison Scandrett(production design), Nicholas Houfek (associate production design), and Nicole Mitchell Mommen (stage management).

The musicians are Dana Jessen (bassoon), Bill Kalinkos (clarinet/bass clarinet), and Andrew Nogal (oboe/English horn).

Pam Tanowitz said of the collaboration between her, Crowner, and Shaw, “It’s exciting for me to be able to see how the other art forms frame the dance. What does Caroline’s music do to my dances? When I teach choreography, I ask my students, ‘what is this music doing to your dance?’ Caroline's music helps uncover narratives in my dance, and it helps shift meanings with gesture and action. Sarah's paintings also do that. When the action and the gestures are set in front of the paintings, and framed by these big, graphic, beautiful, abstract works, it actually uncovers the mystery of my dance.”

Crowner said, “I think this is a really interesting experiment: Can we make our mediums more alive than they already are? What are the music and dance doing to my paintings? What happens when an abstraction functions as a set or backdrop? Paintings don't move and they don't speak, so do the movements of Pam’s choreography and the enigmatic absence or presence of Caroline’s sound make my paintings come alive or do they become even stiffer and more mute? This dynamic oscillation is the most fun and essential part of our collaboration.”

Said Shaw, “I've gotten to work with Pam a lot, and every time I’ve learned something entirely new, and I grow in a different way. [This process] is incredibly playful, and I love it. I talked with Pam a few days ago about a section of the music that felt too emotional, and I wanted to have more of the abstract quality that her dance has, while maintaining a relationship to the Beethoven. I love the Sixth Symphony. I love Beethoven. I don't think of him as this weighty character that you must fight against. We don't have to take it that seriously. And yet, music I take incredibly seriously. I think he did, too. I've also been thinking about Sarah's paintings— the edges of the color, the organic shapes. They're not soft or blurred, they're confident. And these are the kinds of gestures that I'm trying to achieve with the music. It's not medium, it's not halfway. It has very confident gestures, with clear edges between things.” 

Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Fisher Center at Bard, Gideon Lester, said, “It’s an honor for the Fisher Center to support Pam Tanowitz’s extraordinary career. Pastoral is creative alchemy—a major collaboration between three superlative artists working together to create something quite new and yet rooted in tradition. The Hudson Valley is itself a pastoral idyll, and the perfect place to develop and premiere Pastoral.”

Performances take place Friday, June 27 at 7 pm, Saturday, June 28 at 7 pm, and Sunday, June 29 at 3 pm in the Sosnoff Theater. There will be an Opening Night Member Toast on Friday, June 27; a Preshow Conversation with the Artists on Sunday, June 29 at 2 pm; and round-trip transportation from NYC on Sunday, June 29. 

Pastoral kicks off Bard SummerScape 2025, setting the stage for a festival replete with enthralling considerations of classical music. This year, across multidisciplinary programming in dance, opera, and music, classical compositional legacies are explored in exhilarating new ways and brought into revelatory discussion with the contemporary world. Meanwhile, the legendary Spiegeltent (June 27 – August 16), curated by the Fisher Center's own Jason Collins, will once again be filled with live performance, genre-bending, and merrymaking. The “hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure” (The New York Times), with its bountiful offerings in the Fisher Center and Spiegeltent, is a destination for breathtaking, thought-provoking performances and gatherings in an idyllic Hudson River Valley setting.

The festival will feature the first fully-staged U.S. production of Bedřich Smetana’s seldom-performed opera Dalibor(July 25 – August 3). Dalibor is directed by Jean-Romain Vesperini—returning to the festival after staging Saint-Saëns’ likewise rare Henri VIII at SummerScape in a “vibrant,” “lovingly treated” production (The New York Times, in a Critic’s Pick review)—with the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein. The Bard Music Festival returns for the 35th year with an in-depth journey into the dynamic and genre-spanning compositions of Bohuslav Martinů (August 8–10, 14–17). Over two weekends, the festival presents kaleidoscopic, performance-and-panel-based explorations of Martinů’s work: A Musical Mirror of the 20th Century (August 8–10) and Against Uncertainty, Uniformity, Mechanization: Music in the Mid-20th Century (August 14–17).

Tickets for mainstage events start at $25. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call the Fisher Center box office at (845) 758-7900.

Post Date: 05-15-2025